The Vice: The Environmental Protection Agency Funded Diesel Experiments on Children

The Vice: The Environmental Protection Agency Funded Diesel Experiments on Children

by Colleen Curry The Vice

A conservative environmental law group with a history of criticizing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), launched a new attack on the agency this week, releasing a trove of documents showing that the EPA experimented on young children with diesel fuel…

The experiments took place from 2003 to 2010 at UCLA’s Children’s Environmental Health Center and UCLA’s Immunology and Allergy Department under the supervision of a number of doctors including Frank Gilliland and David Diaz-Sanchez, neither of whom responded to requests for comment on this story.

For the research, the doctors administered a nasal spray containing “soot from a diesel truck (diesel exhaust particles),” according to consent forms signed by volunteers. The volunteers would then come back the next day and the researchers would test their nasal fluid to measure their response to the soot. The goal was to understand how adults and children reacted to diesel soot, according to the documents.